In a recent class, one of my students responded to the question, “what do you want to tell me?” with “I created an event in order to bring the scene to life”. She went on to tell me that she knew how her character felt in the scene because she had gone through something similar in her own life and wanted to bring that to her work. Of course, when I asked her how she had accomplished that, she was stuck for an answer. Hoping that she related her effort to what she had been practicing in the training part of the class, I asked her leading questions about the sensory life of the event to which she referred. Questions such as, “what were you wearing, were you indoors or out, was it day or night, etc.?” She had not given these types of questions any thought until I asked them, and even then she was hard pressed to remember. Not that it truly mattered. She is not sufficiently advanced in her training to be able to sustain so many sensory elements simultaneously in order to bring the event to life. What she had done, like so many others was to concentrate on remembering the event rather than re-experiencing it.
Why do so many people continue to do this in the face of all the information about Lee Strasberg’s work that teaches us otherwise? Why do so many actors go to an event rather than discovering the simple element that makes them feel similarly now? Certainly, there are too many unqualified teachers who still pass along this misinformation. But there is another, more important reason. It comes naturally to us to want to do this. As sensitive, creative actors we relate the events that we read about in our scripts to our own lives. This empathy for our characters and what they are living through is a strong component of our interpretation. It allows us to bring our unique perspective to every part we play. It is what makes audiences want to see each actor’s portrayal of well-known characters.
How then should an actor go about avoiding this trap and finding what will serve them instead? How can an actor go about making the events in her life an aid rather than an impediment in her acting? Although I don’t intend to make these articles teaching guides, the following paragraphs will shed light on a process that takes advantage of each actor’s life events and lead them to discover how to become similarly alive onstage. It will also free up the actor’s creative time, leaving more time for that all important part of acting – play.
When each of us first reads a play we begin to relate to what our characters are experiencing and doing. Even when the events of the play are far outside our own experiences, they are filtered through our own perceptions of the world. For example, a person who has an aversion to white water rafting and has never done it can still recognize the thrill that it presents to his character. Such a person might even relate that thrill to something that took place in his own life such as “that time my parents took me on an amusement park ride”. This is where it is easy to go off track in making choices for the acting. It is natural to want to go to the event at the amusement park.
The same type of thinking can occur about life events. When reading about a character proposing marriage or asking for a divorce, or doing something dishonest or dangerously criminal it is natural to relate it to our own history even when we have never done anything similar. We might remember the time we fell in love or broke up with someone. We might remember how terribly we behaved toward another person and how it made us feel. Here again. it is natural for an incompletely trained actor to want to go to that personal experience in an effort to make the character live. It is also true that the more we train as actors, the more we participate in life, the greater our sensitivity and empathy become. (This demand was made of us by Stanislavski’s protégé, Vachtangov). As a result, the numbers of times these associations are made increases.
Lee Strasberg and Method Acting take us in another direction. Lee asked us to use our personal experiences and life events to understand the plays and our characters, but then he guided us to finding something that makes us feel similarly now. Rather than try to recreate or remember events or a time in our life, find the single sensory experience that triggers a parallel response here and now. It’s different for every actor and often it is dissimilar to the events in the script. It might be that a spectacular sunset creates the type of excitement in one individual (the actor) that the birth of a child creates in another (the character). It could be anything: a Person, a Place, an Overall Sensation, a Personal Object. It could be anything at all. It might be something that you have already created and explored in class. It could be something new that only came to you after you finished reading the play. What is important is that you have something to actually create rather than something to think about.
In summation, it might look like this. 1. Read the play. 2. Relate your personal experiences to what you have read. (My students often accuse me of telling too many personal stories. This is in an effort to get them to see how this part of our process works). 3. Now that your experiences have informed your understanding of the play, set them aside. 4. Search for the simple sensory exercise that excites your behavior in that direction now. 5. PLAY.